scvn2812

However, part of being a director and producer (true in both Abram's and Bay's cases iirc) is that you can send the script back for rewrites and say you're not shooting this garbage. Love it or hate it, Abram's apparently had all the time in the world for rewrites for Trek 11 and thought that was as good as it gets. Bay was up against the writer's strike for Revenge of the Fallen but he doesn't have that excuse for the other two movies. I haven't seen it in a while but the first one I seem to remember was semi coherent. But you pretty much hit the nail on the head for my concerns about the two franchises. I don't want to see the only two space opera series left standing become basically the same thing. Sometimes I feel like a Coke, sometimes I feel like a Pepsi.

For someone reason I just flashed back to Darkside of the Moon. That just causes a bit of bile to gurgle in my stomach thinking about what Michael Bay would do to either franchise. Thank the maker its not my childhood he was messing with and that his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot seems to have dead ended. My friends defend it saying you know what you're not supposed to have high expectations for it and it doesn't have to make sense, its about the giant robots battling, but I still felt dumber walking out of the theater and a bit insulted.

I suppose the knee jerk reaction is always "the Federation will win" but clearly this doesn't have the certainty of say USA vs Japan in WW2 where the US had a bigger GDP than all three axis members put together, its critical industries well out of range of any air or sea attack and the ability to rebuild every sunken ship or shot down plane twice over before anyone could even remote think about building a fleet and air force that could actually attack the mainland US. Earth is pretty close to Qonos, a week or two at warp 5 iirc. in an era where most ships can comfortably do warp 7 or 8 and the best can do 9+ for a few hours. Probably the 40 billion deaths in the alternate timeline may have come about because by 2360 a no holds barred war between the Klingons and Federation would be a blood bath. Cloaking devices would force the Federation to make hard choices about their defensive posture: defend the colonies while leaving themselves open to being chewed up piece meal by the Klingons and possibly leaving the core worlds' defenses under strength or serve the colonies up on a platter, a humiliating, demoralizing and enraging move - especially if the Klingons decide to start attacking worthless colonies to try and force the Federation to sally out from the core systems to relieve the suffering of their colonies. If it takes even 30 minutes to respond to a distress call, how many thousands - millions if they use WMDs - can the Klingons kill with orbital bombardment? They can also land plenty of troops and use the civilians as human shields to force Starfleet to land their own troops and draw them into personal combat - think Omicron Theta Iraq IV for how well that would likely go. Given that we don't have a Jane's Guide to the ships of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants with numbers or any idea how to peg industrial capacity, we have no idea how big their relative economies are but obviously the Klingons must be within shouting distance since they evidently can win if certain variables turn up in their favor. In the absence of detailed knowledge about industrial capacity, location of key industrial sites, resource availability, fixed defenses and fleet strengths we can only guess at how likely or unlikely the alternate timeline scenario was or what had to go right for the Klingons or wrong for the Federation for that situation to develop. Its not like WW2 where we can look back with hindsight and see how thoroughly screwed the Japanese were and how utterly beyond hope victory was for them. The Klingons are clearly in a situation where with unity and good strategy they can win but its not clear how easy it is for them to pull it off. Even if you use minimalist numbers for the Star Trek universe, plug your ears and cover your eyes and pretend all those doomsday weapons that blow off planetary atmospheres, destroy planetary crusts and cause stars to go nova; this could still be 40 billion people's worth of bloody just from damage to infrastructure. Well over a million allied casualties were predicted in the invasion of Japan. An island nation with a population in the tens of millions who was facing critical shortages of every last thing you need to make war except warm bodies.

That line about Abram's "being a pig" I think is probably going to be taken out of context and spread across the web to inflame fan passions but I think Shatner has a point. I think its about creativity and diversity of the minds behind scifi. I know Abrams is a huge Warsie and I think that shows a bit in Trek 11 with his style and presentation - if you kind of squint and forget you're watching a Star Trek movie it could be one of the prequels in parts, however, there's an argument to be made that Star Trek and Star Wars ought to have their own voices and that they should be distinct from one another. I'm still planning on seeing both Into Darkness and Episode 7 and I expect both will be enjoyable but I also hope that with Abrams over both that the franchises aren't going to be homogenized. I've got my fingers crossed that Episode 7 won't be Star Trek Wars Into the Sith and that each franchise will have its own distinct flavor.

William Shatner made a good point in an interview I just watched, it does seem like a bit too much consolidation for the two biggest scifi franchises to be under the thumb of the same director. As far as lens flares go, it was one movie. Cloverfield didn't really have them, that movie about the kids and the alien didn't have them....and that's about all I've seen of his movies.

The high yield explosive route is fairly difficult in space due to both the power of the explosive rapidly diminishing as the explosion expands and any explosive sufficiently powerful to pose a risk to a tightly packed squadron of fighters probably poses a risk to your ship too at the ranges fighters typically engage in and much further out if the explosive uses flechettes or shrapnel of any sort to increase its lethality. The beam weapon route works in a low acceleration 'verse IF there's no hand waving to make beam weapons ineffective or inefficient. nBSG for example would seem to have some unspoken hand wave that they've solved the problems inherent in drives that can push a Viper at a few gees (heat, fuel, propellant) but for whatever reason can't weaponize the underlying technologies. They apparently can't take an engine and tighten the particle stream to turn it into a beam weapon of any significant capability or use the incredible heat management that Vipers dog fighting with multi-gee engine burns implies to deal with the heat of a laser. Somehow nBSG took a technology path that ended with 500+ machine guns spewing lead augmented by multi-meter bore cannons launching flak shells being the best anti-missile and anti-fighter defense for capital ships.

Also I'm willing to bet the adaptive nanotechnology armor described in that book is considering lasers with at best the power of a nuclear power plant behind them but maybe not even that powerful. Fully neutralizing a gigawatt laser without armor too dense for plausible space war is something I'll believe when I read it.

Everyone knows space war will not be WW2 in space but at the same time it is undeniably the most popular reference point for space war in American scifi. Which is why I think it might be informative to where appropriate, to carefully make analogies to WW2 when considering universes that blatantly use this model like Star Wars, Babylon 5, Star Trek once they added fighters, and both Galacticas. In the absence of conflicting evidence, I don't think it's a planet sized leap of faith to assume a ship that looks like a WW2 battlewagon with rockets welded on is armored like one or that unless we see more dramatic damage, that fighters that look and act like Spitfires and Zeroes in space are armed proportionately. Not as in they literally are armed like said craft or built with WW2 materials but rather a fighter is about as powerful in relation to a capital ship as you'd expect. Naturally this is a generalization that can be disproven with conflicting observations such as fighters that rend capital ships of any size or are shown to be able to carry space wmds. However, it's a good starting point to fill in the gaps.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he might be thinking of using that trick as a counter measure to lasers. This doesn't really add much to the argument one way or another but I did a little reading and found it took between 30 and 40 bombs and torpedoes to sink Musashi and Yamato. Scale that up to Galactica 2k3 or an ISD and you're looking at thousands of pieces of ordinance assuming fighter bombers are proportionately as powerful to proper naval ships in their respective universes as in WW2. No wonder the Cylons break out the nukes when feasible and the Rebels go after subsystems.

Please put this on Youtube, I have disturbed friends I need to share this with. Never mind: figured out how to download it and then promptly upload it to Facebook.

Bender, Peregrin, Randal and let's face it, probably Zathras just sit this one out and get stoned. Dr. House is a cripple, Baltar isn't good at actually accomplishing anything deliberately - he has to be seduced into accidentally destroying humanity...and I default to Tyralak's response on the rest.

He definitely has a point, if there's one thing we can all agree on, its that Twilight is really, really bad. Like encourages young girls to be in emotionally and potentially physically abusive relationships with self confessed murderers bad. I'm grateful that my girlfriend despises Twilight.

Okay, well I'm not well versed enough in Gundam to say whether there's a tech plateau in place or over the horizon, if so it would be a consideration in bargaining for hyperspace technology with the Earth Alliance. A lot seems to hinge on to what degree the Gundam humans are numb to the suffering of their relatives from a parallel universe and if their alignment is pragmatic evil. Then there is always the long term possibility of the Vorlons and Shadows working to infiltrate this new and strange arrival who possesses military power comparable to their own, though perhaps not a direct answer to their supply of exotic force multipliers and superweapons and ensnare them into the great game for their own benefit. Given Gundam Sol is apparently balkanized, their Sol might end up as one of the fronts in the Vorlons and Shadows eternal war if neither is able to fully subvert all factions.

It rather sounds like the only thing Earth Alliance brings to the table is experience building exceptionally large warships* and their understanding of generating hyperspace vortexes and navigating hyperspace. It sounds vaguely like the Gundam Sol system has a much greater industrial capacity and greater energy densities for their power plants. It also sounds like these M fields would force the Minbari to close to knife fight range where their stealth would almost certainly be a whole lot less effective - it clearly does not work well enough at visual range to prevent Earth ships from ramming them. Assuming the two are able to get along, at the early stages it ought to be viable for EA ships to tow or share navigation data with Gundam ships while traveling through hyperspace. Eventually, though, in order to get their long term cooperation, the Earth Alliance is probably going to have to give up its only real bargaining chip: hyperspace travel, though they will almost certainly insist on M-technology. Whether they get it or not is another story though. Gundam Sol has them over the barrel of a gun. Gundam Sol could probably hold against anything short of attack by a Shadow planet killer. They don't need to save the Earth Alliance unless they are motivated by compassion for their fellow human beings who stand on the brink of extermination. On the other hand, they don't stand to lose much of an advantage in giving it away. It will take the Earth Alliance time to get used to the technology and to start producing designs that are competitive with Gundam and even then, from what little I've had time to glean from the Gundam wiki, there's still several more eras to go before Gundam tech progression plateaus, if they plateau. * I suspect the size of Earth ships in B5 has a lot to do with the desire to build survivable and relevant warships as a technologically backward power that also happens to be uniquely gifted in either industrial capacity or possessing a bloody minded, stubborn willingness to commit exorbitant resources for military parity with races who have much better energy to mass ratios for their ships like the Centauri and League races. The Earth navy is probably atrociously expensive by the standards of their neighbors but its hard to argue with the results.

Both have committed planetary scale atrocities to punish resistance. I think it would be a hard argument to make as to whose core structure and ideology is more barbaric. In absolute terms the Empire wins by virtue of having the scale of an entire galaxy to oppress and the resources to build a planet buster but I'm not sure that the Terrans wouldn't build one too if they could. However, I think it's important to note that both have less than total control over their subjects. Both have active resistance groups using military hardware comparable one on one with what the official military has which means the resistance movements likely have significant backing from within the power structures of these empires. It's no small thing to build and operate a warship without a friendly port to call on for repairs and resupply. I'd say it's even more significant for the Terrans since given the scale of the Galactic Empire, it's big enough that if military hardware can or will be salvaged, lost or stolen no matter how unlikely, it will happen. In the Enterprise era its harder to imagine concealing the deliberate construction of illegal warships or the deliberate loss of legal self defense forces given the much smaller scale and the greater commitment of resources a ship represents. I suspect that the rebellion in Enterprise might have been a mass defection of vassals who had been allowed to maintain self defense auxiliaries. A rebellion gaining access to military hardware in an empire with maybe a few dozen planets with the infrastructure to build a capital ship implies more freedom than a few dozen ships being scraped together in a galactic Empire.

If you ever get a chance, pick up Through Struggle The Stars, it's 3 bucks for an e book and does a wonderful job of stitching together a very unique feeling space war model that has very little hand waving. It's heavily inspired by the ideas of Atomic Rockets.

According to Ali's post, the Minbari war has just started. Which means there's 2 or 3 years to blend the best of Gundam and Earth Alliance technology before the Minbari reach Earth. Hybrid designs are probably out of the question realistically for at least a year into the war. I think we saw the proto-Omegas in what was implied to be late in the war in the In The Beginning Montage so that represents probably at least a year to get the Narn weapons online and that was for technology that was very similar in form and function to Earth's. Not only do they need to start producing hyperspace worthy ships with the new technology, they need to do so in such quantities that they can push the Minbari out of Earth space. Being willing to commit atrocities is all fine and dandy - if you're fighting on someone else's turf. Given the extreme differences in form and function between Earth and Minbari technology, its highly unlikely the Minbari were making use of captured Earth infrastructure so there is exactly zero benefit from scorched earth tactics. So the war has to be won in space, which means ship to ship slug outs - asymmetric warfare tactics like Sheriden's rouse to kill the Blackstar will win small tactical victories but this new Earth Alliance needs a practical way to win in space on the strategic scale. Against the Minbari specifically that's really going to come down to beating their stealth whether through advanced sensors that can justifiably defeat their stealth or human wave assaults that are able to consistently overrun Minbari lines and to do so in a way that causes the Minbari to suffer losses they cannot easily greater than Earth's. Defeating the Minbari in battle isn't enough, they also have to be beaten so severely that Earth can replace its losses faster than the Minbari and thus gain ground.

Also the analogy between the pirates and the destroyer is a sea one. Space is much more like air war in that far more volume has the be given over to propulsion if you want to get anywhere in a reasonable time and it's virtually impossible to have a realistic space craft with naval armoring that is also capable of reasonable acceleration. A big space ship will have more in common with a B52 than a destroyer. So it may be very likely that small caliber weapons can shoot up a big ship.

Well, there's the analogy of torpedo boats. The pirate motor boat gets nailed because the pirates don't have access to the kinds of compact destructive hardware that would give them the ability to damage a warship. They don't have the budget for that and it's not the intended purpose of the pirate boat in the first place. The pirate's goal is to put pirates aboard a ship and then get away quickly. For a useful fighter, it comes down to how much fat there is on the typical warship in a setting. If the fuel, parts, crew provisions and assorted other stuff a ship carries that is not directly related to its combat power takes up enough space then the possibility does exist to build a miniature ship without all of that stuff and for it to devote 100% of its volume to the sole purpose of spending only a few hours away from home and blowing stuff up. Which basically is what we can assume most universes have done. However it requires a fighter to have the acceleration to put enough uncertainty in her position at any given moment to survive the approach to its target or to be deployed within a close enough range of the target to be hard for weapons to track it. The Earth Alliance is probably the most inexcusable as they don't often get to start out at knife fight ranges and their weapons have the reaction time to disrupt enemy fire which is much faster than the fighters. And their fighters are limited to human endurance for acceleration rates so it becomes even more hard to justify. They are possible but it requires hand waving in how you set up the universe: A fighter such as an X-Wing or Andromeda's fighters from a universe where quadruple gee accelerations are the norm can be kilometers away from where you thought it was going to be just by tapping on the gas. in BSG 2k3 energy weapons are apparently not practical for warfare and fighters deploy within a few dozen kilometers of their target at most. In Star Trek, fighters can drop out of warp within kilometers of the target. B5...is really, really hard to make excuses for. I really don't know why you can't mount a few dozen Starfury cannons on an Omega or why capital ships can't just carve them up with beam weapons from kilometers away.

Effective electronic warfare is very, very difficult in space. Atomic Rockets does a much better job of explaining the problems than I can. I believe the cliff notes is that passive detection methods like picking up EM signals is so much more effective in space due to the lack of atmosphere that at ranges where you're close enough to fight, you're basically naked to one another. They can tell almost everything about you from your heat signature and you can't fake EM emissions of a starship magnitude without an actual starship magnitude power plant. Even if you could fake it, a good telescope will give you away every time.

It depends on how your universe really plays out. In universes where the fighters have the ability to get close enough (basically WW2 distances) that tracking them is difficult then they work, assuming they are capable of carrying enough fire power to meaningfully menace an opponent. This is basically the excuse for most sci-fi since most of them came just FTL in within spitting distance. On the other hand, once you get to a certain scale of ship, the usefulness of fighters is questionable without some deus ex to excuse them. Star Wars fighters can pass through the outer reaches of shield envelopes and hit subsystems that are lightly or unshielded. B5 fighters don't have to worry about shields and capital ship weapons are very big, obvious targets. I'm not entirely sure why no one thought of mounting smaller, more agile interceptor guns like the ones on B5 on a starship until the Victory-class though. The reality of course is that if the assumptions of a universe don't allow for FTL-ing in at "pistols at dawn" ranges, said fighters would have to cross the vastness of space and probably take much longer than it would take for someone with a laser, even a big clunky one, to melt the fighter a thousand kilometers away. Unless said fighters have enough acceleration and delta V to be constantly thrusting randomly at at least dozens of Gees to clear their silhouette its bye bye fighter.

I've seen numerous reports confirming it. I liked Trek 11 overall though I could have done with just a bit less frantic pace. All the character development was very brute force with not a lot of the more nuanced "adult" themes that make Khan and Undiscovered Country so great. As long as there's nothing too derpy like people recovering in minutes from having rebar through their shoulder it ought to be good (and I forgive Cloverfield that one little thing too) . What few of his movies I've seen have been good.

Back to Han's quote about all the possible calamities about traveling through hyperspace: I don't get the snark, after all, with a name like Millennium Falcon you'd think it was built to last. Its not like its called the Aluminum Falcon. (Okay, someone posted something on Facebook that reminded me of that line from the Robot Chicken sketch so I couldn't resist...)

Some rambling: There's two main strains of thought with regards to shields and KE that I can think of. The first being that if KE was that much harder to defend against than energy, everyone would use KE. The Trade Federation would have just carpet bombed the Gungans. Some types of shields, like the Gungans and the Death Stars's, are permeable to slower moving objects in much the same way that you can wade into water without ill effect but if you jump off of a bridge, unless you hit it just right, your bones and internal organs are goo. Or maybe shields are significantly more threatened by KE but KE has fallen out of favor due to cheap, abundant energy sources that can be stored in such a way as to not seriously hamper the performance of space craft thus making it all but idiotic to spend mass on large missile or projectile magazines that cannot be stored without effecting the ship's mass. The vulnerability to KE is known but with no wars to fight, pre-Clone Wars military procurement was dictated by budget not necessarily effectiveness and/or hampered by centuries old doctrine about the inefficiency and irrelevance of KE. So when it comes time to fight an actual galactic scale conflict, everyone is using energy weapons for their primary weapons but there are novelties being dragged out of the cellars of the galaxy like EMP bombs and mass drivers, the wide spread use of which is hampered by the lack of logistics to support them - most military infrastructure being designed around the construction and maintenance of energy weapons. KE might be starting to come back into vogue as a primary weapon by the Battle of Coruscant (Invisible Hand seeming to have a battery of them) but its too little, too late. Having the resources of an entire galaxy to draw on, the Empire can just build more and bigger warships than any single system or political entity that is likely to try its hand at rebelling so it refrains from encouraging the development of weapons that might upset the strategic balance and also that would necessitate rebuildng an entire galaxy wide logistics network to support a military capable of repressing an entire galaxy that needs a whole new set of equipment to go to war with. Kamikaze tactics are probably not viable under either scenario (weak KE shields / strong KE shields) as fighters would still need a fair bit of time to accelerate up to speeds where they could mangle a capital ship (and its debatable exactly what would happen, a fighter with relativistic KE might over penetrate and only leave a fighter sized hole through the ship, which would not really accomplish a whole lot unless you aimed really well.) Also the longer you accelerate, the harder it is to change your vector. Said kamikaze fighters would have to have enough Gees over their prey to run them down no matter how much delta v their target burned up trying not to be where the fighter is aiming. A Star Destroyer can change its position in space by 30 kilometers with a one second burst of her engines. If she puts the pedal to the metal when the fighter is on her final attack run, good luck changing the vector enough to get a hit. Also a Star Destroyer could always kick her own engines into overdrive and try and slow down the relative velocity of the impact. Given an ISD can run down the Falcon, there's every possibility that an ISD could add enough time to the fighter's attack run that she can down the kamikaze with sheer volume of defensive fire, even if she doesn't have the Gees to bring the relative velocity down to something more tolerable. Internal explosions are almost always worse than external ones since you generally design a ship around resisting damage from outside, which prevents the number one cause of internal explosions in a combat situation: enemy action. Magazine hits have always been the most violent way to end a ship's life at sea. Since they don't generally look like an artificial sun when they explode, its safe to assume that whatever powers Star Destroyers is not very volatile but that's a long ways away from there being nothing aboard the ship that you wouldn't want to have explosive charges attached to.

I think it was yellow but I'll have to check it out when I get home tonight. Hooray capped data. Since he hasn't commented, I'd kick this clip over to Brian. He's floated the idea of Systems Commonwealth vs Empire a couple times and this has a lot to say about Star Wars and kinetics against unshielded hulls.